Engwar

No matter how many browsers are out there I still haven’t found the one true browser that rule ‘em all. This has the awkward situation where there has to be multiple browser instances running at any given time. All the memory that these fellows eats up is not much of a bigger deal because memory is not a problem these days.

For general browsing Firefox is ideal with Adblock Plus and Noscript. Safe and sound. For email (mostly Gmail and Gmail hosted these days) and other Google apps, Chrome fits nicely. Albeit you can’t use Google Chrome because of the annoying user tracking which cannot be turned off. Fixing that is easy, you just have to forget about Google Chrome and use Chromium nighty. Since I’m logged into Gmail no searching on Chrome. Can use the Firefox instance that’s there for general use. Next problem comes when opening up random links that include blogger and other sites with Google analytics. Gah, copy and paste those links to Firefox. My laziness prevent this from happening. Firefox is having Noscript so login to Gmail in that. Now have to use Opera for searching Google. This becomes irritating and I just use Firefox and search on Yahoo.

Using proprietary browsers is an unacceptable solution. You just don’t know what the hell is going on. There are other annoyances as well. A good candidate is Maxthon. Maxthon 3 interface looks like a step in the right direction but has a long way to go to become functional. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to change Maxthon proxy settings without it being changing the IE proxy settings.

When you go beyond Firefox, searching for a better browser, quite frankly there is none.

So, yeah, google browser. For me the most compelling UI change is the tabs on top of addressbar. Had some tabs open and after switching between each other I’m feeling almost tired of the way it’s in Firefox/Opera/IE. That’s brilliance. The other brilliant idea is processes. It’s one of those simple things which make you realize, duh, now why didn’t I think of that before. If you look at some of the brilliant ideas for problems people came up in the past you’ll see that those are things which have been known previously but people have overlooked until someone come along, pick it up and wave it in front of their faces, hey, you can do it like this.

Javascript devs will still be at home with Chrome’s inbuilt javascript debugger. That’s another smart move. For me the Resources option takes a bit of time, but that’s okay. Incognito mode seems to be a bit redundant given the fact that you have the option of clearing the browser history.

The browser, IMHO, is not much of a bigger deal these days. True, you have to have a solid architecture and all that but nowadays, cost of Firefox crashing is negligible. Restart, and you’ll be where you were before the crash (most of the time). The rich ecosystem of browser extensions is more important. Now, it has become the case where I can’t use any other browser without Adblock, Noscript, Taboo and a few other extensions. I tried getting adblocking plus noscript behaviour with Opera without much success. There might be a way, but for me Noscript make the task dead simple.

It’ll be interesting to watch how things will develop in time to come. I’m still happy with Firefox even if Chrome had a Linux version. For me, extensions I’m using are more important.